Black Studies

Steven Den Beste has a powerful and deeply insightful (and also disquieting) piece on the emergence of Black Studies programs:

American blacks make up 12% of our population. I brood about the fact that 12% of our best minds are going to waste, being directed away from useful study and productive contribution in science and engineering and business and law and medicine, instead to bury themselves in ideologically-warped anthropological and sociological studies of race, because they will somehow feel that they have a racial obligation to major in "Black Studies" instead of chemical engineering -- or computer engineering, where I might have been able to hire them. I think about all the miracles they would be creating, all the advances they'd produce. I think of all the fantastic work I've seen done by Chinese men and Indian women, and I know that blacks would be just as valuable. I brood over the lost opportunity, the resource wasted, the opportunity lost.

The recent emergence of the Reparations movement is just another symptom of this. Though the reparations concept has been eviscerated by reasoned argument of some black intellectuals, it still persists. The flip side of the "racial obligation" that Steven describes is a sense of inferiority that is ingrained even deeper - and leads to a permanent sense of victimization. That is a trait that should be beneath a people of dignity.